Inuit cultural trauma and loss of identity

Inuit cultural trauma and loss of identity are presented as the cumulative consequences of colonial intervention in land, livelihood, and social life—not as a single wound confined to the past. In the account Ijitsineq Akesuk gives Leon Anawak, commercial hunting, state relocation, and settlement progressively weaken the conditions that sustained Inuit life. Political autonomy and renewed traditions offer ways forward, but cannot restore the world that was lost; the final emphasis falls on allowing the living time to build another one.

A history of disruption

Akesuk begins with an apparently idyllic image on an old Canadian two-dollar note: Inuit beside a kayak and a harpoon. He asks Anawak to look beyond the reassuring picture and recognize the history of expulsion concealed within it. During the Cold War, the Canadian government relocated nomadic Inuit from their traditional southern Arctic territory to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, near the North Pole. Officials presented the move as beneficial, but Akesuk says the new hunting grounds were worse and that the displaced people were made to wear numbered tags. The contrast between the public image and the account of state policy makes representation itself part of the conflict: a scene that appears to celebrate Inuit life can obscure the circumstances imposed on it.

The relocation followed earlier upheavals. Akesuk recalls white trappers arriving in the 1920s with guns, after which seal and caribou populations were depleted. Inuit hunters also adopted firearms and participated in that depletion, as traditional practices and resources were altered together. Disease outbreaks—including polio, tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria—accompanied the movement away from the land into settlements. By the end of the 1950s, Akesuk says, Inuit were dying of starvation and infectious disease while the government did little. Later, secret radar stations were built on traditional hunting grounds. Inuit residents were treated as obstacles and transported hundreds of kilometres north, with none of the tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds on which life in the Arctic depended.

Displacement from land and livelihood

Akesuk makes clear that relocation did not end when people reached their assigned destinations. Their former hunting grounds were bulldozed, removing both the practical basis for returning and the physical reminders of earlier lives. Caribou migration did not adjust to the new settlements; the relocated people were far from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds. Without adequate food and clothing, families could not simply make up for the loss through determination. Akesuk recalls that people could hunt only limited small game and fish, while their kinsmen continued to die. The account presents hunger not as an individual failure but as the consequence of placing people far from the resources and seasonal patterns that had sustained them.

Over subsequent decades, dependence on welfare followed the destruction of the old subsistence economy. Housing offered by the government around the time Anawak was born brought another kind of change. Akesuk describes the houses as boxes and sets them against a qallunaat way of organizing life through enclosed buildings, vehicles, and boundaries. The point is not simply that Inuit moved indoors: the new built environment carried assumptions about how people should live, while the older relationship to movement and open territory was displaced. Akesuk links that loss of identity to alcohol and drug abuse and suicide, making social suffering part of the history of imposed settlement rather than an unrelated personal problem.

Family memory and political change

The history reaches Anawak through family as well as public events. When he asks whether his father fought for his people, Akesuk answers that he did: Anawak’s father joined the campaign for compensation and rights. Akesuk himself had been young when the relocation took place, and says that the struggle continued through the courts for thirty years. It broke his brother’s spirit. The exchange gives historical injury an intimate scale: the policy is remembered through the family members who endured it and through the cost of contesting it over a lifetime.

The creation of Nunavut in 1999 marks a consequential political change. Akesuk describes it as their own land, where outsiders can no longer dictate what they should do or force them to move. Yet self-government does not undo the damage to the former way of life. The nomadic society Akesuk knew had been organized primarily around family and had no chiefs or leaders in the later governmental sense; Inuit are now governed through a civil state, and the concept of property has become part of a modern industrial order. Political control therefore coexists with cultural discontinuity. The community has gained authority over its territory without recovering the conditions that made its former social order possible.

Renewal without restoration

Akesuk describes cultural renewal in practical terms: people are using dog sleds again, and young people are learning to build igloos and make fire with flints. These practices restore knowledge and offer continuity between generations, but he does not present them as a reversal of history. The march of time continues, and the old life cannot be recovered simply by reviving selected skills. His account holds grief and adaptation together: he acknowledges profound trauma while refusing to make self-pity the only response to it.

He also describes a changing form of mobility. Inuit once travelled freely across a broad territory; now they have come to terms with its limits. In the digital world, young people can move through networks of information, speak with friends in other countries, and tell them about Nunavut. This modern form of connection does not erase displacement, but it creates a new arena for movement and cultural communication. Akesuk’s outlook is neither a claim that technology repairs the loss nor a rejection of change. It recognizes new possibilities while insisting that recovery takes time and that suicide remains a serious concern.

The act of telling

The conversation itself becomes part of the subject’s meaning. Akesuk recounts history to his nephew after a long silence, and Anawak listens rather than turning the account into an abstract lesson. In the scene’s aftermath, Anawak tells Akesuk what the group at Chateau Whistler has learned and what they suspect about intelligent beings in the sea. He knows that sharing this information breaks Li’s instructions, but tells his uncle because he has been silent throughout his life and Akesuk is the family he has left. Their exchange links inherited cultural trauma with Anawak’s own movement from silence toward trust: disclosure becomes an act of kinship.

Akesuk’s final perspective does not promise that historical loss can be repaired. It places responsibility instead on the living, who need time to confront trauma and make a future that is not merely an imitation of the past. The distinction is central to the concept: cultural continuity matters, but demanding that the young carry the dead’s hopes as a substitute for living change would perpetuate the injury. Renewal must include memory without allowing memory to foreclose the future.